Jimmy's Riddles

Jacques-Emile Blanche: James Joyce (1935)

This year, 2024, marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Hans Walter Gabler's still controversial "Critical and Synoptic Edition" of James Joyce's Ulysses.

James Joyce: Ulysses (1922 / 1984)

Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition. Edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe & Claus Melchior. 3 vols. New York and London: Garland, 1984.

In a previous post on this blog, I discussed one of the most notorious features of Gabler's edition, his alleged discovery of the answer to Stephen Dedalus's question to his mother's ghost in the crucial Nighttown chapter (XV: Circe) of Joyce's novel:

Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.

In the original, 1922 text, the ghost instead urges Stephen to repent his sins:

Prayer is all powerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual, and forty days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen.

which drives him off into further ravings: "The ghoul! Hyena!"

In Gabler's text, thanks to the fortuitous discovery of a ms. passage which may have escaped its own author's eye ("Mr. Gabler postulates the skip of an eye from one ellipsis to another, leading to the omission of several lines - the longest omission in the book," as Richard Ellmann helpfully explains in his preface to the 1986 paperback reprint), the word itself was at last revealed:

Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men. Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus ...

Ellmann glosses the Latin as a conjunction of two phrases from Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles:

Aquinas is distinguishing between love, which, as he says in the first six words, "genuinely wishes another's good," and, in the next five, a selfish desire to secure our own pleasure "on account of which we desire these things," meaning lovelessly and for our own good, not another's.

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Michelle Elvy and Marco Sonzogni, ed.: Breach of All Size (2022)

A couple of years ago I was asked to contribute to a collection of "small love stories from 36 Aotearoa New Zealand writers set in or related to Venice and inspired by one of the world’s great (in size and impact) novels: James Joyce’s Ulysses."

Here are the rest of the instructions we were given:

Each story will be 421 words and begin with a phrase taken from the book (two from each chapter), used as the title. Beyond that, you can take your story in whatever creative direction you like (with the idea of ‘love story’ also interpreted by each individual writer).

Your title is:

Skeleton tracks

– which is from the fifteenth chapter of the novel (you can find the whole online at Project Gutenberg, here). You may use this in the story / prose poem, or just keep it as the title – that's up to you.

Why 421 words, and why the lines from the text? We are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses on 2 February 1922, the 1600th anniversary of the founding of Venice in 421. We like the creative clash between flash fiction, championing the micro-story, and Joyce’s sprawling modernist classic. As well, this is a nod to the relationship between New Zealand and Venice that began with Venetian Antonio Ponto’s arrival here aboard James Cook’s Endeavour. Ponto was Aotearoa’s first recorded Venetian visitor; his surname means ‘bridge’.

I do like working with the stimulation of a set of constraints - even ones as arbitrary as these - but the fact that I'd been assigned a phrase from chapter XV, the infamous brothel sequence from the novel, seemed more than a simple coincidence. Hans Walter Gabler, Stephen's mother, and the "word known to all men" duly took their places in the 421-word "love story" I eventually came up with.

Jack Ross: Haunts (2024)

And, yes, I did call it "Skeleton Tracks," as the editors suggested. You can find it reprinted in my latest collection Haunts, published earlier this year by Lasavia Publishing.

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William Michael Balfe: The Rose of Castile (1857 / 2010)

When you start to pick at one detail in Joyce's masterpiece, though, it has a way of leading you on and on through the maze of his infinitely associative mind. "Skeleton Tracks" - I knew it reminded me of something. It turned out to be the "railway line" riddle in chapter VII: Aeolus (the god of wind):

Lenehan extended his hands in protest.
- But my riddle! he said. What opera is like a railway line?
- Opera? Mr O'Madden Burke's sphinx face reriddled.
Lenehan announced gladly:
- The Rose of Castile. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!

While trying to locate this passage, I had the good luck to chance upon the brilliantly informative multi-authored website James Joyce Online Notes, which I can confidently recommend to any other novice adventurers setting out for Joyceland.

The Allusions section of this very compendious site offers the following sources for Lenehan's dreadful pun:

In “Two Gallants” Lenehan is described as “a sporting vagrant armed with a vast stock of stories, limericks and riddles”. The most conspicuous one is quoted above. But when Lenehan demands: "Silence for my brandnew riddle!" ... he is slightly overstating his case, for the first documented punning riddle about Balfe's successful opera turned up only six years after it was premiered in October 1857.

Of what new opera do the present petticoats remind one?
Rose of Castile (rows of cast steel)

- The Boy's Handy Book ... (1863)

One year later the Birmingham Daily Post of Friday, 27 May informs its readers that The Rose of Castile (also Castille) is "popularly miscalled in allusion to its enduring pretensions to public favour, 'The Rose of Cast Steel'".

Punch followed in 1865:

By the bye, if for burlesquing they want to find an opera in which they might most fitly introduce this magnet scene, they had better try their wits upon The Rose of Cast Steel.

The closest forerunner of Lenehan's version was published in “Clippings from the weekly journals” in The Hull Packet and East Riding Times (Hull, England) on Friday, 28 May, 1880:

"What favourite opera," enquires Bauldy, with a hiccup, "does the tramway lines remind one of?" and he replies with a hee-haw when eberybody gibs it up, "Why, the Rows of Cast Steel, to be sure!"

- Harald Beck

Thanks Harald! Much appreciated. If you only knew how much time I've spent trying to track down such inconceivable minutiae through the pages of annotated copies of Ulysses, you'd understand how exciting it is to run across a (constantly expanding) website which answers so many of your nagging questions.

James Joyce: Ulysses (1934)

Mind you, that same "Rose of Castile / Rows of Cast Steel" pun was also used by Henry Morton Robinson in his 1950 bestseller The Cardinal (1950), but of course that was long after the long-banned Ulysses finally became available in a commercial edition in America in 1934.

Campbell & Robinson: A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1947)

Joseph Campbell, & Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. 1944. London: Faber, 1947.

Henry Morton Robinson is perhaps better known as the co-author, with folklorist and philosopher Joseph Campbell, of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), the first substantive attempt to explore the intricacies of Joyce's last - and definitely least accessible - work.

Stuart Gilbert: James Joyce's Ulysses (1930)

Stuart Gilbert. James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study. 1930. London: Faber, 1960.

Campbell & Robinson's work was presumably meant to capitalise on the success of Stuart Gilbert's 1930 book about Joyce's Ulysses. But it wasn't so much Gilbert that punters assumed they were reading in that case - it was James Joyce himself. It was well known that Joyce had supplied Gilbert with much of the detail about the novel's structure and themes included in his text: so it had - and in some ways continues to have - a quasi-authorial status for fans.

James Joyce: Ulysses (1922)

Interestingly enough, as the online Literary Hub article "Ulysses: A History in Covers - The Many Lives of a High-Modern Classic" (2015) reveals:

While bookstores in America were still being persecuted for illegally selling the Shakespeare edition, Beach had the German Albatross Press take over the book’s European publishing; they established an imprint called the Odyssey Press for this purpose. To avoid legal problems, they inscribed this edition’s back page with a note reading, “Not to be introduced into the British Empire or the U.S.A.” This is considered to be the most accurate representation of Joyce’s authorial intent and contains corrections by Stuart Gilbert, who had claimed the title of “the official Joycean.”

James Joyce: Ulysses (1933)

You see what I mean? To a certain sort of mind, following such skeins of association and allusion is almost irresistible. It's not for nothing that Joyce himself said:

The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.

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Jack Ross: Kingdom of Alt (2010)

Take, for example, the riddling postcard in chapter VIII: Lestrygonians (a tribe of man-eating giants, encountered by Odysseus on his voyage home to Ithaka):

She took a folded postcard from her handbag.
— Read that, she said. He got it this morning.
— What is it? Mr Bloom asked, taking the card. U. P.?
— U. p: up, she said. Someone taking a rise out of him. It’s a great shame for them whoever he is.

"U. p: up." What on earth does that mean? I tried in vain to solve it myself. "You pee," perhaps - some kind of gibe about urination. But why "up"? Was I reading too much into it? In any case, why was this card thought to be important enough to be shown around to friends and acquaintances?

Don Gifford & Robert J. Seidman: Ulysses Annotated (1989)

Stuart Gilbert clearly considered it beneath his notice; but neither could I get much satisfaction from Don Gifford & Robert J. Seidman's annotated version of the novel.

So I asked a distinguished Joycean of my acquaintance to unravel it for me. To no avail. It did inspire a poem, though:

U.p.: Up


I thought of a story about an Academic
one who hadn’t noticed he was dead
because they never opened up
the windows in his room

He sat there at his desk
book-ended by his filing cabinets
fading patterns on the wall
where his photographs had been

From time to time he’d look up from the pages
of last century’s quarterlies
see that day had shifted into dusk
& the streetlights had come on

The air was stale in there
he didn’t care
no need to tweak & update
the same old lectures now

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“U.P.: Up” – Ulysses
I asked you to define it for me once
you couldn’t
not to my satisfaction anyway

I wonder if you’ll find it easier
alone there in the dark
pebbles in your pockets
chattering

to anyone who’ll listen?
Ave atque Vale then
to your Van Dyke beard
defiant little puku

amused bravado
whatever you deserved it wasn’t this
embarrassed silence these
absurd periphrases this

hermetically-sealed chamber
whose contents must
at the stroke of dawn
turn into dust

[2/7-21/10/08]

Later I added it to the novella "Coursebook found in a Warzone," included in my 2010 collection Kingdom of Alt:

So what does designated hitter John Simpson have to say about it on the James Joyce Online Notes site?

Well, for a start, he takes the matter quite seriously, and admits its complexity:

Sometimes there are too many options available to allow us to be confident about the meaning (or a set of meanings) that should be ascribed to a term. Joyce’s use of “U. p: up” with reference to the slightly crack-brained Denis Breen is regarded as just such a problem, and it is one that has puzzled Joyce scholars for decades.

Wisely, he begins with a summary of the context of the pun, or gag, or insult, or whatever it is:

Denis Breen receives a postcard. The message on the postcard seems to be U.P. Breen himself is infuriated, and wants to sue the sender for the astronomical sum of £10,000. Mrs Breen folds the postcard up and puts it in her bag, but still shows it to Bloom, who needs an explanation for the abbreviation. When others hear of the message they laugh. Why is the message so potent? Why does Joyce repeat the expression fourteen times in the pages of Ulysses?

Why, indeed?

Robert Martin Adams carefully reviews five principal options (Surface and Symbol, pp. 192-3). Don Gifford follows other commentators by throwing in one or two more possibilities. Vladimir Nabokov preferred to associate the expression with “U.P. spells goslings”, apparently a schoolboy insult recorded principally in the English midlands. Richard Ellmann is attracted to the schoolboy humour of “you pee up”, apparently the source of various potential urinatory or sexual innuendoes. Leah Harper Bowron carries the speculation game to the extreme, with a specific medical diagnosis:

Denis Breen 'pees up' or sprays his urine upward when urinating from a standing position because he has hypospadias and his urethral opening is within or behind his testes.

To avoid the pitfalls of retrofitting the sense of the message it seems safer, from a linguistic point of view, to look at what the expression “U. P.” might mean. Sam Slote sensibly offers a conservative view:

U. P.: up - 'U.P., the spelling pronunciation of UP adverb, = over, finished, beyond remedy' (OED, s.vv., U; u.p.). The expression 'U.P.: up' dates at least as far back as Dickens (as quoted in OED).

We know that the French translation of Ulysses (at least approved in general if not at every turn by Joyce) takes a similar line:

In the French edition of Ulysses the postcard is translated fou tu, "you're nuts, you've been screwed, you're all washed up". (Gifford: p. 163)

I should add to the note above the explanation that "fou tu" translates literally as "mad you" but also resembles a ruder word, "foutu", which translates (again literally) as "fucked."

The notes on the Joyce website continue as follows:

We might look at how Joyce himself employs the term in a letter to Valery Larbaud of 17 October, 1928:

Apparently I have completely overworked myself and if I don't get back sight to read it is all U-P up.

Joyce includes a reference to the expression in a Cyclops notebook (dated to June – September 1919 in Zurich). As he had finished Lestrygonians in the autumn of 1918 this was probably just a reminder, but the entry seems to make it clear that “U. P.” is regarded by Joyce as being equivalent to “up” ...

We should remember, too, that just before Mrs Breen takes the folded postcard from her handbag to show it to Bloom, she says that her husband has been frightened by a nightmare in which he saw “the ace of spades” climbing “up” the stairs. The “ace of spades” is “a widow, esp. one wearing mourning weeds”, according to the OED. The expression is listed in Heinrich Baumann’s Londinismen, a catalogue of London cant and slang which Joyce knew and cites elsewhere. Perhaps that helps to explain Mr Breen’s eccentric reaction.

The general opinion within Joyce’s texts is that the unusual expression “U. p.: up” means more or less what the Oxford English Dictionary says: “over, finished, beyond remedy”.

And so on and so forth. A section quoting innumerable earlier uses of the expression follows, which I won't trouble you by sampling from in detail. However, it's worth mentioning the conclusion:

At present the balance of evidence between the numerous potential meanings is more or less equal, with only one or two elements of support for each. But a review of contemporaneous attestations makes us realise that the traditional, conservative meaning (“all up”, finished, over) was much better known in Joyce’s day and for over half a century before than is remembered today. This does not rule out other interpretations, but it does tend to isolate the dominant sense.

In overall summary, then:

Joyce uses variations of the expression “U P: up” fourteen times in Ulysses. The colon seems to indicate that the two sections of the expression have equivalent status and are not part of a longer abbreviation. The evidence is overwhelming that the ordinary person in the late nineteenth century would have known “U.P.” or “U.P. up” as a slang expression meaning “all up”, “over, finished, without remedy”, even “not likely to survive”. We know from a letter in 1928 that Joyce knew this explanation, and we assume that this is the meaning of the term he wrote down on one of his notesheets. In some circles, “U.P.” was also a well established abbreviation for “United Presbyterian”, but it is questionable how relevant this is to Denis Breen.

From the internal dynamics of Ulysses and from the social etiquette of the day (would Mrs Breen show Molly's husband a postcard with a virtually unspeakable obscenity?) we might regard the “You pee up” interpretation, which has sometimes found favour, to be laboured. The final occurrence of the abbreviation in the novel is found in Molly’s monologue ...:

Now hes going about in his slippers to look for £10000 for a postcard U p up O sweetheart May wouldn’t a thing like that simply bore you stiff to extinction actually too stupid even to take his boots off

After the I-narrator of “Cyclops” Molly has perhaps the most slanderous tongue in Ulysses. And yet she passes up the opportunity to make a malicious comment on the supposedly obscene allusion behind the wording of Breen’s postcard. She simply regards him as a forlorn-looking spectacle of a husband who is mad enough on occasions to go to bed with his boots on. This is in keeping with the way in which Breen is regarded generally in the novel – the cronies in Cyclops collapse with laughter at his lunatic behaviour, not because of some urinary or sexual irregularity.

There have been many other interpretations of the expression, normally made without appreciating the strength of the traditional meaning. One or other of these alternative readings may of course still be valid in a context of multiple interpretation, but without additional understanding of why Denis Breen runs to lawyers when he sees the postcard it is probably safest to stick to the conservative reading and to regard the others as only distant possibilities.

James Joyce: Molly Bloom's Soliloquoy (read by Marcella Riordan)

Mind you, I'm not entirely convinced. I do still feel there's some urinary (or sexual) gibe underlying the sinister postcard - I can't see why Dennis Breen, eccentric though he undoubtedly is, would have reacted to it so strongly otherwise. And the "slanderous" Molly Bloom's use of the expression "bore you stiff to extinction" sounds a little pointed to me, in context.

I suppose, though, that the whole ridiculous farrago goes to illustrate a celebrated dictum from Vladimir Nabokov which I used to quote when introducing James Joyce's story "Clay" to my first-year Creative Writing students:

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong with the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have all been lovingly collected. If one begins with a ready-made generalization, one begins at the wrong end …

It may well seem a waste of time to worry about the implications of the term “U. p.: up” instead of pondering the larger influence of Ulysses on twentieth-century European literature, but trying to do that would be (according to Nabokov) to start at the wrong end.

His remarks continue as follows:

Let me submit the following practical suggestion. Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain ... Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed - then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavour will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature (1981)

Hopefully that's something we can all assent to.

Vladimir Nabokov: A Map of Joyce's Ulysses (c.1948)

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Marjorie Fitzgibbon: James Joyce (1990s)

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
(1882-1941)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Fiction:


1. Dubliners (1914)
   1. The Sisters
   2. An Encounter
   3. Araby
   4. Eveline
   5. After the Race
   6. Two Gallants
   7. The Boarding House
   8. A Little Cloud
   9. Counterparts
   10. Clay
   11. A Painful Case
   12. Ivy Day in the Committee Room
   13. A Mother
   14. Grace
   15. The Dead
   • Dubliners. 1914. London: Jonathan Cape, 1944.
   • Dubliners: The Corrected Text. 1914. Explanatory Note by Robert Scholes. 1967. Jonathan Cape Paperback JCP 58. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968.
   • Dubliners. 1914. Ed. Terence Brown. 1992. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.
   • Included in: The Essential James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin. 1948. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
   • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: The Definitive Text, Corrected from the Dublin Holograph by Chester G. Anderson. 1916. Ed. Richard Ellmann. 1964. Jonathan Cape Paperback JCP 59. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968.
   • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Ed. Seamus Deane. 1992. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.
   • Included in: The Essential James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin. 1948. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
3. Ulysses (1922)
   • Ulysses, with ‘Ulysses: A Short History’, by Richard Ellmann. 1922. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
   • Ulysses. 1922. Illustrated by Kenneth Francis Dewey. Franklin Centre, Pennsylvania: The Franklin Library, 1979.
   • Ulysses: The Corrected Text. 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe & Claus Melchior. 1984. Preface by Richard Ellmann. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
   • Ulysses: The 1922 Text. Ed. Jeri Johnson. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
   • Gilbert, Stuart. James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study. 1930. London: Faber, 1960.
   • Gifford, Don, with Robert J. Seidman. Notes For Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1974.
   • Delaney, Frank. James Joyce’s Odyssey: A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses. Photographed by Jorge Lewinski. 1981. A Paladin Book. London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1983.
4. Finnegans Wake (1939)
   • Finnegans Wake. 1939. London: Faber, 1949.
   • Scribbledehobble: The Ur-Workbook for Finnegans Wake. Ed. Thomas E. Connolly. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961.
   • A Shorter Finnegans Wake. Ed. Anthony Burgess. 1966. London: Faber, 1968.
   • Beckett, Samuel, Marcel Brion, Frank Budgen, Stuart Gilbert, Eugene Jolas, Victor Llona, Robert McAlmon, Thomas McGreevy, Elliot Paul, John Rodker, Robert Sage, & William Carlos Williams. Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress. With Letters of Protest by G. V. L. Slingsby & Vladmir Dixon. 1929. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1972.
   • Campbell, Joseph, & Henry Morton Robinson. A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake. 1944. London: Faber, 1947.
   • McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
5. Stephen Hero. 1904–06 (1944)
   • Stephen Hero: Part of the First Draft of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”. 1904-6. Ed. Theodore Spencer. 1944. Revised Edition with Additional Material. Ed. John J. Slocum & Herbert Cahoon. 1956. London: Jonathan Cape, 1969.

Poetry:


6. Chamber Music (1907)
   • Included in: The Essential James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin. 1948. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
7. Pomes Penyeach (1927)
   • Pomes Penyeach and Other Verses. 1927. London: Faber, 1968.
8. Collected Poems (1936)
9. Giacomo Joyce. 1907 (1968)
   • Giacomo Joyce. 1907. Ed. Richard Ellmann. 1968. Faber Paperbacks. London: Faber, 1983.

Plays:


10. Exiles (1918)
    • Exiles: A Play in Three Acts. 1918. Introduction by Padraic Colum. N.E.L. Signet Modern Classics. 1962. London: the New English Library Limited, 1968.
    • Included in: The Essential James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin. 1948. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.

For Children:


11. The Cat and the Devil (1965)
12. The Cats of Copenhagen (2012)

Miscellaneous:


13. The Essential James Joyce. Ed. Harry Levin (1948)
    • Levin, Harry, ed. The Essential James Joyce. ['Dubliners', 1914; 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man', 1916; 'Exiles', 1918; 'Chamber Music', 1907]. 1948. London: Jonathan Cape, 1952.
14. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. Ed. Ellsworth Mason & Richard Ellmann (1959)
    • Ellmann, Richard, & Ellsworth Mason, ed. The Critical Writings of James Joyce. London: Faber, 1959.
15. Poems and Shorter Writings (1991)
    • Poems and Shorter Writings: Including Epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce and ‘A Portrait of the Artist.’ Ed. Richard Ellmann, A. Walton Litz & John Whittier-Ferguson. London: Faber, 1991.

Letters:


16. Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Stuart Gilbert (1957)
    • Gilbert, Stuart, ed. Letters of James Joyce. Chronology by Richard Ellmann. London: Faber, 1957.
17. Letters of James Joyce, Vol. 2. Ed. Richard Ellmann (1966)
18. Letters of James Joyce, Vol. 3. Ed. Richard Ellmann (1966)
19. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann (1975)
    • Ellmann, Richard, ed. Selected Letters of James Joyce. 1957 & 1966. London: Faber, 1975.

Secondary:


20. Eliot, T. S., ed. Introducing James Joyce: A Selection of Joyce’s Prose. 1942. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1964.
21. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce: New and Revised Edition. 1959 & 1982. Oxford University Press Paperback. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
22. Ellmann, Richard. Ulysses on the Liffey. 1972. London: Faber, 1974.
23. Joyce, Stanislaus. My Brother’s Keeper. Ed. Richard Ellmann. Preface by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1958.
24. Levin, Harry. James Joyce: A Critical Introduction. 1944. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1960.
25. Power, Arthur. Conversations with James Joyce. Ed. Clive Hart. 1974. London: Millington Books Ltd., 1978.
26. Walsh, Keri, ed. The Letters of Sylvia Beach. Preface by Noel Riley Fitch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Sylvia Beach and her Bookshop (1922)

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Pressure Cooker

Netflix: Pressure Cooker (2023)

Warning: numerous plot-spoilers ahead!

Over the years, Bronwyn and I have worked out some parameters for our own personal taste in Reality TV.

We're not particularly interested in people in bikinis and speedos arranging trysts in far-off tropical resorts. Nor do we like eye-on-the-wall programmes about people having spiteful arguments in cramped apartments ... nor vote-them-off-the-island Survivor-type gamesmanship shows.

Not that we're throwing shade on anyone who does, mind you. Quot homines tot sententiæ, as the Latin dramatist Terence once put it: "So many people, so many opinions". Or, as Clint Eastwood paraphrased it in The Dead Pool: "Opinions are like assholes. Everbody's got one."

So where does that leave us? What we do seem to like consistently are programmes where a group of people compete in terms of some particular skill they all share.

Vogue: Tracing Reality TV Style (2020)

As a result, we've watched competitions between fashion designers (Project Runway / Next in Fashion), glass artists (Blown Away), interior designer experts (Interior Design Masters / The Big Interiors Battle), make-up artists [MUAs] (Face Off / Glow Up: Britain's Next Make-Up Star), metalworkers (Forged in Fire / Metal Shop Masters), potters (The Great Pottery Throw Down), home sewers (The Great British Sewing Bee), woodworkers (Good with Wood: Britain's Best Woodworker) - even Drag fashion designers (Sew Fierce!)

It sounds like quite a lot, when you list them like that. Every single one of them started off strange, then quickly became compelling. The intensity and sheer talent of the competitors was inspiring and (to be honest) a little intimidating at times.

Entertainment Weekly: The 20 best cooking competition shows (2024)

What I haven't yet mentioned are the innumerable cooking programmes we've watched - some featuring trained chefs, others inspired amateurs - most of them designed to crown some "Top Chef" or "Master Chef" or "Best Baker" at the end of a series of gruelling contests.

Netflix: Culinary Class Wars (2024)

At one time or another, we've probably tried them all. We don't have much patience left for the quasi-ubiquitous Gordon Ramsay, and neither of us ever really took to My Kitchen Rules, but we're always ready to give a newcomer a go. Recently that's included the intense Korean cooking competition Culinary Class Wars, as well as the new American show, Pressure Cooker, which - according to Wikipedia:

has been described as a mix of Top Chef and Big Brother - combining the cooking challenges of the former, and the social politicking of the latter.

Tudum: Pressure Cooker Contestants

By contrast, for all its Squid Game-style trappings, and its attempts to whip up class resentment along the lines of Oscar-winning Korean movie Parasite, Culinary Class Wars was really just a standard competitive cooking show like any other: the whims of the judges were what counted most.

Eater: Culinary Class Wars Judges & Contestants

In this case the two judges - veteran restaurateur Paik Jong-won, and Michelin three-star chef Anh Sung-jae - were presumably chosen for their respective penchants for traditional Korean cookery and international fine-dining.

As it turned out, they didn't always vote according to formula - nor did they really clearly embody the Old Guard / Young Turk divide which the show was designed to highlight. But when Anh Sung-jae announced that he would never give any dish - even one of his own - much more than 90 out of 100 ("since there's always room for improvement"), while Paik Jong-won regularly awarded much higher grades, the fairness of this system did seem a little open to question.

In essence, to quote a Stephen King-ism, SSDD [Same Shit, Different Day]. The focus throughout was too much on the judges, and the preprogrammed nature of the eventual decision led us to suspect that the producers had pretty much decided in advance that a young Black Shirt had to win over an old White Shirt, and a "genuine" Korean had to defeat the multicultural outsider Edward Lee.

The unpleasant arrogance of the young victor "Napoli Matfia" [? misspelling of Mafia?], whose predilection for pasta and other Italian dishes throughout made one question whether he could possibly have won fair and square if he, too, had been forced to undergo the interminable penultimate tofu challenge, left a somewhat bitter taste in the mouth.

What's more, Edward Lee's imperturbable courtesy, combined with his virtuosity and encyclopedic knowledge of the culinary arts, made him seem a more appropriate judge than competitor in such an exhausting ordeal.

The fact that Lee has gone from strength to strength since, whereas the actual "winner", Kwon Sung-jun, has been forced to eat humble pie and apologise profusely on social media for his churlish remarks and attitude throughout the series, combined to create a less than satisfactory experience.

Stephanie Diani: Top Chef (2023)
l-to-r: Tom Colicchio, Padma Lakshi, Gail Simmons

To me, the whole thing illustrated the twin pitfalls of the TV cooking competition:

1. the vogue of the celebrity judge:

   As the number of series mounts up, contestants have come and gone in their droves; as a result, the presenters and judges have a tendency to become the real stars. Padma Lakshmi and her right-hand man Chef Tom Colicchio in Top Chef, Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith in The Great British Bake Off, and the various generations of Australian Masterchef judges all have their own catchphrases and mannerisms. At least the American shows have eschewed the tiresome British formula of having one or two clapped-out comedians to front each show, alongside some more sober-sided experts, but they too have their increasingly cast-iron tics and conventions.

2. ubiquitous (and often inappropriate) product placement:

   Top Chef is a particular offender in this regard. Challenges sponsored by some particular junk-food manufacturer have become increasingly common, and increasingly obtrusive. Sponsorship should not come with tacit endorsement of such products in defiance of all the laws of good nutrition ...

So why is Pressure Cooker such a refreshing departure from this model? Well, put simply, because it lacks judges and presenters: only the competing chefs are on display. Also, however, because the emphasis is on what the various cooks do with their ingredients, not on who supplied them in the first place.

So here they all are - all 11 contestants - in order of dismissal (you can see why I warned you about spoilers at the head of this post!)

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Pressure Cooker Contestants
in order of departure

1: Liv Ben

Liv was sent home for serving undercooked chicken during the first challenge.

2: Christan Willis

This was the first piece of game-playing. The contestants had to choose between Christan and Brian, and the latter persuaded them that although he might be a weaker cook, he'd be a more grateful ally down the road.

3: Brian Nadeau

In the breakfast cook-off between Brian and Ed, more people voted to keep the latter than the former.

4: Lana Lagomarsini

More gamesmanship. The devious Jeana persuaded the others that Lana was more of a threat to them than she was, given the latter's greater skill as a chef.

5: Ed Porter

Ed didn't stay for the customary goodbyes, but simply walked out on hearing that his dish had been judged last.

6: Jeana Pecha

It had to happen. Jeana's intriguing finally caught up with her, and the vote to expel her was unanimous.

7: Caroline Gutierrez

Caroline made a tiny error in her dish, and that was enough to condemn her, given the very high standard of all the food by this stage in the competition.

8: Renee Blackman

There was a bizarre twist towards the end when Mike's winning dish earned him the right to decide which of the other three would face him in the final. He chose Robbie, possibly because he considered him a weaker opponent than either Renee or Sergei.

9: Sergei Simonov

Sergei was rather lost in any case without his "work wife" Caroline (her phrase). The others had taken to referring to the duo as "Sergoline," and saw their apparently unbreakable alliance as a looming threat.

10: Mike Eckles

Mike assumed that his fine dining skills would bring him victory, but unfortunately for him, other factors - such as day-to-day behaviour in the house - came into the final decision as well.

11: Robbie Jester

And so Robbie, the underdog, carried off a popular and well-deserved victory. Despite his great talents, he probably wasn't the stronger chef, but he seemed to a majority of the others to be a more worthy human being.

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William Poundstone: Prisoner's Dilemma (1992)

William Poundstone. Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

I certainly don't claim to be any authority on Game Theory, though I have dutifully worked my way through the book pictured above. Much of it was, alas, over my head. In particular, understanding the complexities of the "Prisoner's Dilemma" concept requires a grasp of mathematics which I simply don't have.

What I do understand about it seems, however - to me, at least - directly relevant to this competition. It's for this reason that I included so much detailed information about the fortunes of each contestant under the list of cast photographs above.

But what exactly is this "Prisoner's Dilemma"? This is how William Poundstone explains it:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of speaking to or exchanging messages with the other. The police admit they don't have enough evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They plan to sentence both to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the police offer each prisoner a Faustian bargain. If he testifies against his partner, he will go free while the partner will get three years in prison on the main charge.

So the dilemma is simply this: should they both clam up, or should they testify against each other? But wait, there's more:

Oh, yes, there is a catch ... If both prisoners testify against each other, both will be sentenced to two years in jail. The prisoners are given a little time to think this over, but in no case may either learn what the other has decided until he has irrevocably made his decision. Each is informed that the other prisoner is being offered the very same deal. Each prisoner is concerned only with his own welfare — with minimizing his own prison sentence.

So, in other words, there are four different possible outcomes for prisoners A and B:

• If A and B both remain silent, they will each serve one year in prison.
• If A testifies against B but B remains silent, A will be set free while B serves three years in prison.
• If A remains silent but B testifies against A, A will serve three years in prison and B will be set free.
• If A and B testify against each other, they will each serve two years.

Here's a little diagram to illustrate these various scenarios:

Wikipedia: Prisoner's Dilemma

So if I'm A and you're B, what's my best line of action? If I think that you're likely to stay silent, then it would be best for me to turn you in. If, however, I think you're likely to talk, then it would be best for me to talk too, rather than staying silent and getting three years instead of two.

Is it best to be selfish, or to show solidarity with my fellow prisoner?

The Wikipedia article on the subject sums it up as follows:

Regardless of what the other decides, each prisoner gets a higher reward by betraying the other ("defecting"). The reasoning involves analyzing both players' best responses: B will either cooperate or defect. If B cooperates, A should defect, because going free is better than serving 1 year. If B defects, A should also defect, because serving 2 years is better than serving 3. So, either way, A should defect since defecting is A's best response regardless of B's strategy. Parallel reasoning will show that B should defect.

Defection always results in a better payoff than cooperation, so it is a strictly dominant strategy for both players.

So far, so easy. That's pretty much Adam Smith's prescription of enlightened self-interest and the invisible hand of the market. But life isn't always as simple as that. There are also variants on the game:

If two players play the prisoner's dilemma more than once in succession, remember their opponent's previous actions, and are allowed to change their strategy accordingly, the game is called the iterated prisoner's dilemma.

This "iterated prisoner's dilemma" is also called the "peace-war game":

The iterated prisoner's dilemma is fundamental to some theories of human cooperation and trust. Assuming that the game effectively models transactions between two people that require trust, cooperative behavior in populations can be modeled by a multi-player iterated version of the game.

The value of cooperation cannot be taken for granted, however:

If the iterated prisoner's dilemma is played a finite number of times and both players know this, then the dominant strategy ... is to defect in all rounds. The proof is inductive: one might as well defect on the last turn, since the opponent will not have a chance to later retaliate. Therefore, both will defect on the last turn. Thus, the player might as well defect on the second-to-last turn, since the opponent will defect on the last no matter what is done, and so on. The same applies if the game length is unknown but has a known upper limit.

For cooperation to emerge between rational players, the number of rounds must be unknown or infinite. In that case, "always defect" may no longer be a dominant strategy. ... rational players repeatedly interacting for indefinitely long games can sustain cooperation. Specifically, a player may be less willing to cooperate if their counterpart did not cooperate many times, which causes disappointment. Conversely, as time elapses, the likelihood of cooperation tends to rise, owing to the establishment of a "tacit agreement" among participating players. In experimental situations, cooperation can occur even when both participants know how many iterations will be played. [my emphases]

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Tudum: Pressure Cooker Contestants

The analogies with the game-show Pressure Cooker are, of course, far from exact. For a start, there are 11 players, not 2, and the competition rules change unpredictably with each challenge.

From my own observations - particularly of the straight-to-camera footage of each contestant - virtually all of them came into this situation determined to look after number one, and to follow the strategy most likely to earn them victory.

And yet, by the end of the programme, even the most arrogant and driven of the various competitors - Mike - was at least paying lip service to the amount he'd "learned" from the other chefs, and the ways in which he'd grown as a person as a result.

In fact, the only one of them who had much to fear when this footage was screened to the world - and her fellow contestants - was Jeana. She'd told a number of lies in the course of the episodes, and was suspected of duplicity by most of the others as a result. She justified all this as simply "playing the game," but the fact that none of her dishes ever came top at any point made it seem as if she saw this as her only chance of winning.

Everyone else formed alliances and friendships, but during the "blind tastings" of each other's food, there was not a single occasion when any of them applied any criterion except simple merit - although some of them discussed the idea of trying to detect and vote down the work of more powerful players, they didn't actually do it.

The strong abilities of almost all of the chefs - even Jeana, whose mastery of Mexican cuisine became apparent as the contest went on - made it clear that they were learning from each other as they got more familiar with one another, and that in many ways this was supplanting the increasingly distant prospect of that single cash prize.

In the end, Robbie's final meal was described by him as an hommage to the other chefs, with explicit references to particular dishes they'd cooked coded into each course. This "heart on his sleeve" approach - compassionate towards the others, but also honest about his own feelings - appears to be what won him the competition.

His younger opponent Mike, almost certainly his superior in technique and inventiveness, lost by a margin of one vote, mainly because - as a few of them remarked - he was guaranteed great success in his career in the long run, in any case.

Even though the participants did know how many iterations of the basic game would be played, the elements of uncertainty in each round seem to have made cooperation and mutual respect not only a viable but a winning strategy. The most orthodox gameplayer, Jeana, was eliminated because the others all had memories of her previous action. They could compare what she was saying now with what she'd done previously.

And, in the eyes of the larger community outside the game, almost all of the contestants - besides Jeana - had shown themselves skilful and cooperative in all sorts of cooking situations. Who would hesitate to work with any one of them? Jeana, however, had failed the job interview. Her longterm prospects of opening a restaurant with her long-estranged father seem dubious. All this despite the fact that her skill at blending flavours, and in Mexican cooking in particular, were strongly in evidence on screen.

To quote one Reddit commentator's blunt assessment:

She was so grimy for what she did to christian and lana. So many alligator tears and fake encounters, she was my least favorite 1000%

Jeana, I wish you well, but I doubt that you have much prospect of remaining friends with any of the other cast members. I just hope your strict adherence to self-advantage, the optimum strategy within a single-iteration version of Prisoner's Dilemma, doesn't cost you too dearly in the other parts of your life.

Jeana Pecha

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The Quest for the Great Second World War Novel

Edward Dmytryk, dir.: The Caine Mutiny (1954)

The other night Bronwyn and I watched the latest version of Herman Wouk's play "The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial", which is streaming on Neon at present. The movie is poignant for a number of reasons. It's one of the great Lance Reddick's final screen performances. It's also director William Friedkin's last film, released two months before his death.

Friedkin is, of course, better known for directing The Exorcist (1973) - as well as The French Connection (1971), for which he won a best director Oscar; Reddick for his work in The Wire and the John Wick franchise. Both men's professionalism and versatility are strongly on display in this gripping courtroom drama.

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial: Kiefer Sutherland as Capt. Queeg (2023)

But the focus wasn't really on them. It was on Kiefer Sutherland, as he did his best to emulate Humphrey Bogart's fabled performance as the paranoid Captain Queeg. Who can ever forget those little steel balls clicking in Bogie's hands as he recited the saga of the missing strawberries and the forged galley key?

Sutherland does a splendid job. He wisely eschews some of Bogart's more memorably mannerisms in favour of a more measured yet equally terrifying fugue on the witness stand. Where the new version couldn't bear comparison with the original film, however, was in the casting of the treacherous Lieutenant Keefer.

Fred MacMurray was so good in this role that he threatened to overshadow the other leads. Lewis Pullman is perfectly adequate in this 2023 remake - of the 1953 stage-play Herman Wouk made out of his Pulitzer-prize winning 1951 novel, rather than of the novel itself, it should be stressed - but he keeps to his place as part of the supporting cast.

Caine Mutiny Court Martial: Multitudes, Multitudes cake (1981)

What struck me most about the new film, though, was the fact that despite rather awkwardly updating the mutiny from the 1940s to the 2020s, the director chose to retain the details of the war novel Multitudes, Multitudes which Lt. Keefer is supposed to have been working on throughout the events of Wouk's story.

I couldn't find a picture of the book-cake created for Keefer's latest launch party online - it's far more spectacular than this one from a 1981 UK production of the play - but at least the image above gives you some idea of the scene where this measly, treacherous writer is put in his place by the heroic lawyer who's just, very reluctantly, got them all acquitted of mutiny.

So much for the Great War Novel! And the weaselly, sneaky types who write such things ... people like Herman Wouk himself, one is tempted to add. But then, perhaps that's the whole point of his book.

Norman Mailer in uniform (c.1945)

You see, one of the other things I've been doing lately is reading - for the very first time - Norman Mailer's own renowned war novel The Naked and the Dead. There's no denying that it's a gripping piece of work. It doesn't really sound much like the Mailer I know: either such fictions as An American Dream or Ancient Evenings, or 'documentary novels' like The Armies of the Night or The Executioner's Song.

Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948 / 1998)

In fact, if I had to come up with an analogy, it would probably be with John Dos Passos. To me, at least, The Naked and the Dead seems distinctly in tune with the quasi-cinematic methods employed by the latter in his USA trilogy: The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen Nineteen (1932) and The Big Money (1936). Better Dos Passos than Hemingway, one might say. Hemingway's clipped, laconic style was only too fatally attractive to other prose writers of the time.

John Dos Passos: The USA Trilogy (1930-36)

You do have to give Mailer credit for being one of the first out of the gate when it came to producing the great American WWII novel:

Mailer was inducted into the army in March 1944, less than a year after graduating with honors from Harvard with a B.S. in engineering. His experience in the army as a surveyor in the field artillery, an intelligence clerk in the cavalry and a rifleman with a reconnaissance platoon in the Philippine mountains, gave him the idea for a novel about World War II ...

- NY State Writers' Institute (2007)

As you can see from the following list of my own top ten picks for best English-language novels about the Second World War, it can take a while to absorb so devastating an experience, let alone transform it into fiction. Here are some of the most prominent examples:

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1. 1948 - Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter (1948)

Is this a "war novel" in the accepted sense? I would certainly say so. Greene wrote two other novels, The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The End of the Affair (1951), set during the London blitz. The unnamed East African setting for The Heart of the Matter was later confirmed by Greene himself to be Freetown, Sierra Leone, a location very familiar to him, as he'd been posted there by MI6 to take charge of local security in the mid-1940s. Greene's protagonist Scobie's crisis of faith, which eventually leads him to commit suicide, made perfect sense to contemporary audiences preoccupied with the moral issues raised by the German death-camps and the implications of the Atomic bomb.


Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter (1948)



2. 1948 - Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948)

The novel takes a long while to take flight. It isn't, in fact, till the members of the platoon it centres on are sent out to do reconnaissance behind enemy lines that Mailer's more familiar existential issues begin to come into play. Paradoxically, the powerful plotting and stylistic polish of this, his first published novel, created problems for him later on. His next two novels were flops, and it wasn't until the early 1960s that he really began to come into his own as an essayist and chronicler of contemporary American culture.


Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948)



3. 1951 - James Jones: From Here to Eternity (1951)

This was James Jones's first novel, and its immense success both as a novel and as a film overshadowed much of his later work. His subsequent novel The Thin Red Line, based on his personal experience of the Guadalcanal campaign, is arguably his masterpiece. Collectively, they constitute the first two parts of a trilogy:

1. From Here to Eternity (1951)
2. The Thin Red Line (1962)
3. [with Willie Morris] Whistle (1978)

John Keegan nominated The Thin Red Line as, in his opinion, 'one of [the few] novels portraying Second World War combat that could be favorably compared to the best of the literature to arise from the First World War' ... Paul Fussell said that it was 'perhaps the best' American WWII novel.

It was filmed by Terrence Malick in 1998. Nothing, of course, can touch the classic status of Fred Zinneman's 1953 movie of From Here to Eternity, but Malick's film is far more ambitious cinematically.


James Jones: From Here to Eternity (1951)



4. 1951 - Nicholas Monsarrat: The Cruel Sea (1951)

This book had a huge effect on me when I first read it as a teenager. It seemed a more convincing portrayal of the (so-called) "Battle of the Atlantic" than anything else I'd ever come across: its miseries as well as its occasional triumphs. I still have a soft spot for it.


Nicholas Monsarrat: The Cruel Sea (1951)



5. 1952-61 - Evelyn Waugh: Sword of Honour (1952-1961)

I suppose Brideshead Revisited would have to be seen as a kind of war novel, too - as was the more directly topical Put Out More Flags. The Sword of Honour trilogy:

1. Men at Arms (1952)
2. Officers and Gentlemen (1955)
3. Unconditional Surrender [aka "The End of the Battle"] (1961)

is probably less spectacularly brilliant than either of those two. Its strength lies rather in the coverage it provides of Waugh's whole war: from the absurdities of Guy Crouchback's Commando training, to the debacle of Crete, and subsequently the fleshpots of Egypt. Is it a great novel? Certainly it's the most ambitious fictional project Waugh ever attempted: a roman-fleuve based directly on his own experience. It is, in my view, indispensible for any real understanding of Britain at war.


Evelyn Waugh: Sword of Honour (1952-1961)



6. 1961 - Errol Brathwaite: An Affair of Men (1961)

I remember that this famous New Zealand novel was greatly in demand by my fellow-students at Secondary School, who passed it from hand to hand like a kind of prose war-comic, full of action and slaughter. It's a much better book than that description would suggest, though, and should definitely be more widely read. Brathwaite's approach to the effects of war on the people of Bougainville is clearly strongly influenced by Graham Greene. Although, as the title suggests, this is an "affair of men" rather than one to do with God, the latter keeps on creeping in as sole arbiter of the action, even so.


Errol Brathwaite: An Affair of Men (1961)



7. 1961 - Joseph Heller: Catch-22 (1961)

What can one say about Catch-22 after all these years? The recent attempt to straighten it out into chronological sequence for the 2019 TV miniseries underlines a point one scarcely thought needed stressing: that the jumbling up of the narrative is the only thing that makes it bearable. The 1970 film did much better in that respect. Its more repellent aspects, especially the crude sexual imperialism constantly on display among Yossarian and his comrades, was unfortunately the main thing I took from it in my own most recent rereading. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to navigate my way through it again - but surreptitiously sneaking a peek at my grandmother's copy made a strong impression on me in my teens.


Joseph Heller: Catch-22 (1961)



8. 1969 - Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

This, too, seemed more mannered than I expected when I reread it recently. Is it really the masterpiece I once assumed it to be? It's a great and complex book, but there's an unpleasant irony in the reflection that the historical "facts" Vonnegut relies on in his eye-witness account of the bombing of Dresden are unfortunately mostly taken from the thoroughly unreliable account by David Irving, now completely discredited by Professor Richard Evans in his brilliant account (Lying about Hitler) of the 2000 Irving libel trial. There's something deeply compelling about Vonnegut's overall project, though, nevertheless.


Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)



9. 1971-78 - Herman Wouk: The Winds of War / War and Remembrance (1971 / 1978)

It does seem a little extraordinary that having so thoroughly satirised the notion of a huge, all-encompassing war novel - Lt. Keefer's Multitudes, Multitudes - in his own The Caine Mutiny (1951), Herman Wouk then sat down and tried to write it himself. Opinions differ on the merits of Wouk's immense, double-volume chronicle. I dutifully slogged through it at the time, but it's hard to see it now without the overlay of the dreadful multi-part TV miniseries it gave rise to. It's longer than anything else in this list - longer than War and Peace, for that matter - but longer and more all-encompassing doesn't always mean better. It does have real merits, though: Wouk is certainly a skilful writer.


Herman Wouk: The Winds of War (1971)



10. 1973 - Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Is this the war novel to end all war novels, or is the V1 and V2 bombing of London just a frame for a more complex agenda on Pynchon's part? Who can say? No-one else could have conceived such a book, let alone carried it out. It seems an appropriate place to end our investigations, before we plunge into the conceptual abyss of the Vietnam war. I recall my old PhD supervisor, Colin Manlove, solemnly informing me that he considered it the masterpiece of our age. It's important to remind yourself of that as you try to work your way through the novel's immensities - perhaps this is the one which should have been called Multitudes, Multitudes ...


Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

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Hugo Claus: The Sorrow of Belgium (1983)

Mind you, I could have greatly expanded this list if I'd permitted myself to include foreign-language novels about the war.

Günter Grass: The Tin Drum (1959)

Hugo Claus's controversial The Sorrow of Belgium, about the unpalatable truths of collaboration in wartime Europe; Günter Grass's ground-breaking The Tin Drum, the first volume in his classic Danzig Trilogy - The Tin Drum (1959), Cat and Mouse (1961) and Dog Years (1963); Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate (1959), a devastating analysis of Russian society at the time of the battle of Stalingrad; not to mention Väinö Linna's harrowing The Unknown Soldier (1954), about Russia's "Winter War" against Finland, are a few of the titles that immediately spring to mind.

Vasily Grossman: Life and Fate (1959)

The first three, in particular, are works on a scale and level of ambition that leave most of their English-language competitors in the dust.

Väinö Linna: The Unknown Soldier (1954)

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Paul Fussell: The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)

Perhaps, in fact, as Paul Fussell argued in his influential book The Great War and Modern Memory, most of the writing on this theme is so influenced by the templates set up by certain classic World War I exemplars, that it's difficult really to see them independently of that overpowering literary tradition.

Let's see. Here are ten of the most famous English-language novels about - or closely concerning - the First World War which might well have had a strong effect on their successors in the field:

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1. 1918 - Rebecca West: The Return of the Soldier

"The Return of the Soldier is the debut novel of English novelist Rebecca West, first published in 1918. The novel recounts the return of the shell shocked Captain Chris Baldry from the trenches of the First World War from the perspective of his cousin Jenny. The novel grapples with the soldier's return from World War I with mental trauma and its effects on the family, as well as the light it sheds on their fraught relationships."

- Wikipedia: Rebecca West


Rebecca West: The Return of the Soldier (1918)



2. 1921 - John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers

"Until Three Soldiers is forgotten and fancy achieves its inevitable victory over fact, no war story can be written in the United States without challenging comparison with it — and no story that is less meticulously true will stand up to it. At one blast it disposed of oceans of romance and blather. It changed the whole tone of American opinion about the war; it even changed the recollections of actual veterans of the war. They saw, no doubt, substantially what Dos Passos saw, but it took his bold realism to disentangle their recollections from the prevailing buncombe and sentimentality."

- H. L. Mencken


John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers (1921)



3. 1922 - E. E. Cummings: The Enormous Room

"The Enormous Room (The Green-Eyed Stores) is a 1922 autobiographical novel by the poet and novelist E. E. Cummings about his temporary imprisonment in France during World War I ... The title of the book refers to the large room where Cummings slept beside thirty or so other prisoners. However, it also serves as an allegory for Cummings' mind and his memories of the prison – such that when he describes the many residents of his shared cell, they still live in the 'enormous room' of his mind."

- Wikipedia: E. E. Cummings


E. E. Cummings: The Enormous Room (1922)



4. 1924-26 - R. H. Mottram: The Spanish Farm Trilogy (1924-26)

The Spanish Farm Trilogy:

1. The Spanish Farm (1924)
2. Sixty-Four, Ninety-Four! (1925)
3. The Crime at Vanderlynden's (1926)


"The Spanish Farm ... won the 1924 Hawthornden Prize. In 1927 it was made into a silent film entitled Roses of Picardy ... William Faulkner greatly admired The Spanish Farm trilogy, comparing it with Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage for its insights into the reality of war. The scholar Max Putzel summarised this by stating: "Mottram had given Faulkner an example for dealing with war by indirection, understating or disguising the powerful emotions Crane had boldly undertaken to summon up."

- Wikipedia: Ralph Hale Mottram


R. H. Mottram: The Spanish Farm (1924)



5. 1924-28 - Ford Madox Ford: Parade's End

The Tietjens novels:

1. Some Do Not ... (1924)
2. No More Parades (1925)
3. A Man Could Stand Up — (1926)
4. Last Post (1928)


"Parade's End is a tetralogy of novels by the British novelist and poet Ford Madox Ford, first published from 1924 to 1928. The novels chronicle the life of a member of the English gentry before, during and after World War I. The setting is mainly England and the Western Front of the First World War, in which Ford had served as an officer in the Welch Regiment, a life he vividly depicts ... Robie Macauley, in his introduction to the Borzoi edition of 1950, described it as "by no means a simple warning as to what modern warfare is like... [but] something complex and baffling [to many contemporary readers]. There was a love story with no passionate scenes; there were trenches but no battles; there was a tragedy without a denouement" ... In his introduction to the third novel, A Man Could Stand Up--, Ford wrote, "This is what the late war was like: this is how modern fighting of the organized, scientific type affects the mind."

- Wikipedia: Parade's End


Ford Madox Ford: Parade's End (1924-28)



6. 1925 - Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway

"The novel has two main narrative lines involving two separate characters (Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith); within each narrative there is a particular time and place in the past that the main characters keep returning to in their minds. For Clarissa, the 'continuous present' (Gertrude Stein's phrase) of her charmed youth at Bourton keeps intruding into her thoughts on this day in London. For Septimus, the 'continuous present' of his time as a soldier during the Great War keeps intruding, especially in the form of Evans, his fallen comrade."

- Wikipedia: Mrs Dalloway


Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway (1925)



7. 1926 - William Faulkner: Soldiers' Pay

"The plot of Soldiers' Pay revolves around the return of a wounded aviator home to a small town in Georgia following the conclusion of the First World War. He is escorted by a veteran of the war, as well as a widow whose husband was killed during the conflict. The aviator himself suffered a horrendous head injury, and is left in a state of almost perpetual silence, as well as blindness. Several conflicts revolving around his return include the state of his engagement to his fiancée, the desire of the widow to break the engagement in order to marry the dying aviator herself, and the romantic intrigue surrounding the fiancée who had been less than faithful to the aviator in his absence."

- Wikipedia: Soldiers' Pay


William Faulkner: Soldiers' Pay (1926)



8. 1928-36 - Siegfried Sassoon: The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston: Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man / Memoirs of an Infantry Officer / Sherston’s Progress (1928, 1930, 1936)

The Sherston Trilogy:

1. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man (1928)
2. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930)
3. Sherston’s Progress (1936)

Autobiographical Trilogy:

1. The Old Century and seven more years (1938)
2. The Weald of Youth (1942)
3. Siegfried's Journey, 1916–1920 (1945)

Diaries (ed. Rupert Hart-Davis):

1. Diaries 1915-1918 (1983)
2. Diaries 1920-1922 (1981)
3. Diaries 1923-1925 (1985)


"The Sherston trilogy is a series of books by the English poet and novelist Siegfried Sassoon ... They are named after the protagonist, George Sherston - a young Englishman of the upper middle-class, living immediately before and during the First World War. The books are, in fact, 'fictionalised autobiography', wherein the only truly fictional things are the names of the characters. Sassoon himself is represented by Sherston. A comparison of the Sherston memoirs to Sassoon's later, undiluted autobiographical trilogy ... shows their strict similarity, and it is generally accepted that all six books constitute a composite portrait of the author, and of his life as a young man. (Sassoon remarked, however, that his alter-ego personified only one-fifth of his actual personality. Unlike his author, Sherston has no poetic inclinations; nor does he deal with homosexuality, which was illegal at the time Sassoon was writing.)"

- Wikipedia: Sherston Trilogy


Siegfried Sassoon: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930)



9. 1929 - Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero

"Aldington, a veteran of World War I, claimed that his novel was accurate in terms of speech and style. It contained extensive colloquial speech, including profanity, discussion of sexuality and graphic descriptions of the war and of trench life. There was extensive censorship in England and many war novels had been banned or burned as a result. When Aldington first published his novel, he redacted a number of passages to ensure the publication of his book would not be challenged. He insisted that his publishers include a disclaimer in the original printing of the book with the following text:

To my astonishment, my publisher informed me that certain words, phrases, sentences, and even passages, are at present taboo in England. I have recorded nothing which I have not observed in human life, said nothing I do not believe to be true. [...] At my request the publishers are removing what they believe would be considered objectionable, and are placing asterisks to show where omissions have been made. [...] In my opinion it is better for the book to appear mutilated than for me to say what I don't believe."

"

- Wikipedia: Death of a Hero


Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero (1929)



10. 1929 - Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

"A Farewell to Arms is ... set during the Italian campaign of World War I. First published in 1929, it is a first-person account of an American, Frederic Henry, serving as a lieutenant ... in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The novel describes a love affair between the American expatriate and an English nurse, Catherine Barkley. Its publication ensured Hemingway's place as a modern American writer of considerable stature. The book became his first best-seller and has been called "the premier American war novel from [...] World War I."

- Wikipedia: A Farewell to Arms


Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms (1929)

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Ernst Jünger: Storm of Steel (1920)

The first thing that I'd note about most of the novels listed above is their tendency to concentrate on the long-term effects of the War rather than the actual details of conflict. That is a subject much more frequently dealt with in non-fiction memoirs of war experience, books such as Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That (1929) or Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel (1920).

Interestingly enough, the Wikipedia entry on "War Novels", which can otherwise be recommended as a good overview of the subject, discusses Jünger's work as if it were an important example of the genre! Graves's book, too, began as a novel but was subsequently transformed by him into autobiography. It's as if the borders between memoir and fiction had been eroded by the sheer power of the experience.

After all, the two great showpieces of the genre, Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869) and Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) were written long after the battles they recorded, by authors who'd hadn't experienced them first-hand. Tolstoy, it's true to say, had served at the Siege of Sebastopol during the Crimean War, which certainly gave him a certain edge in his descriptions of war. Crane had only read about it in books, however. He didn't even observe it from afar, as a war correspondent in the Spanish-American war in Cuba, until after the completion of his novel.

The real problem with the novels listed above, though, is how little collective influence they had. Once again, though to a much greater extent this time, all the action was elsewhere. All the really influential First World War novels were written in other languages and subsequently translated into English. Here's a very partial list:

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Henri Barbusse: Under Fire: The Story of a Squad (1916)



1. Henri Barbusse: Under Fire: The Story of a Squad (1916)

Barbusse's vital account was actually written and published at the height of the conflict. As a novel, it reads like a foretaste of Erich Maria Remarque's more famous chronicle of trench warfare, but it was able to exert a strong influence over war poets such as Sassoon and Owen at the apex of their creativity. For that reason alone it would demand our attention, but it's also a powerful novel in its own right.


Jaroslav Hašek: The Good Soldier Švejk (1921-23)



2. Jaroslav Hašek: The Good Soldier Švejk (1921-23)

This may be the single greatest and most influential war novel of all time. It's the Don Quixote of the genre. Švejk has cast a long shadow over any subsequent attempts to glorify or idealise the details of warfare. Bert Brecht wrote a sequel, Schweik in the Second World War (1943), but he had little to add to Hašek's immortal original.


Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)



3. Erich Maria Remarque: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

The recent Oscar-winning German film adaptation of Im Westen nichts Neues (2022) - the latest in a long and distinguished line of such movies - made it obvious that its message has still not really got across. Remarque's harrowing anti-war novel was transformed in this new version into a bizarre and sadistic paean to German aggressiveness. The setting was shifted from the beginning to the end of the war, simply (it would seem) to allow for a scene where German soldiers take bloody revenge on the smug allied victors. It was clearly scripted by someone who still believed in the Nazi myth of the "stab in the back" by the (so-called) "November criminals" which cost Germany victory in the war. Hopefully this nonsense will soon sink into oblivion and allow Remarque's gentle, humane novel to be read again as it should be: as a denunciation of the absurdity of war.


Jules Romains: Verdun (1938)



4. Jules Romains: Verdun (1938)

Jules Romains' immense roman-fleuve Les Hommes de bonne volonté [Men of Good Will] (1932-46) used to be listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest novel ever written. Maybe - maybe not. It all depends on what you call a novel. In any case, two of the volumes, Prélude à Verdun and Verdun, are often printed together as a single account of the battle, the longest and possibly the bloodiest single battle in the entire First World War, if not the whole of European history.


Arnold Zweig: The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927)



5. Arnold Zweig: The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1927)

Arnold Zweig (no relation to Stefan) was a German Jewish writer, a pacifist and a socialist. His major work, Der große Krieg der weißen Männer [The Great War of the White Men] (1927-57), a novel-cycle in six parts, includes the following titles:



1. Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa [The case of Sergeant Grischa] (1927)
2. Junge frau von 1914 [Young woman of 1914] (1931)
3. Erziehung vor Verdun [Education before Verdun] (1935)
4. Einsetzung eines königs [The crowning of a king] (1937)
5. Die Feuerpause [The Ceasefire] (1954)
6. Die Zeit ist reif [The time is ripe] (1957)


The first in the series, The case of Sergeant Grischa, is by far the most famous. It's a satire on the bureaucracy which accompanies war, and which preoccupies higher command to the exclusion of mere victory in battle. Education before Verdun was also widely read at the time, as was Zweig's postwar novel The Axe of Wandsbeck (1947):

based upon the Altona Bloody Sunday riot which resulted from the march by the Sturmabteilung, the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, in Altona on 17 July 1932. The march turned violent and resulted in 18 people being shot dead, including four Communists ... who were beheaded for their alleged involvement in the riot.

.

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Pat Barker: The Regeneration Trilogy

I don't know if it's entirely fair of me to feel so suspicious of more contemporary attempts to revisit the landscapes of the two world wars in fiction. But it seems to me at times as if these scenes have become so familiar to us that most writers can whip up an ersatz trench scene or D-day scenario at the drop of a hat.

There are exceptions, however. I did find myself moved by Pat Barker's careful recreations of the world of the Great War poets and conscientious objectors in her Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995).

For the rest, though, these novels continue to pour out in all shapes and sizes, covering as many sides of the conflict as possible. It's becoming as clichéd a subject as the court intrigues of the Tudors, or the murderous ways of the early Roman Emperors ...

"5 must-read Canadian novels about the Great War" (2014)

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Norman Mailer (2013)

Norman Kingsley Mailer
(1923-2007)

Books I own are marked in bold:

Novels:


1. The Naked and the Dead (1948)
   • The Naked and the Dead. 1948. London: Allan Wingate (Publishers) Ltd., 1954.
2. Barbary Shore (1951)
   • Barbary Shore. 1951. Ace Books. London: The New English Library Limited, 1961.
3. The Deer Park (1955)
   • The Deer Park. 1957. A Corgi Book. London: Transworld Publishers, Ltd., 1967.
4. An American Dream (1965)
   • An American Dream. 1965. Panther Books Limited. St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1973.
5. Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967)
   • Why Are We in Vietnam? 1967. London: Panther Books, 1970.
6. A Transit to Narcissus (1978)
7. Of Women and Their Elegance (1980)
8. Ancient Evenings (1983)
   • Ancient Evenings. 1983. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1984.
9. Tough Guys Don't Dance (1984)
   • Tough Guys Don’t Dance. 1984. Panther Books. London: Book Club Associates / Michael Joseph Ltd., 1985.
10. Harlot's Ghost (1991)
    • Harlot's Ghost. 1991. Michael Joseph. Harmondsworth: The Penguin Group, 1991.
11. The Gospel According to the Son (1997)
12. The Castle in the Forest (2007)
    • The Castle in the Forest: A Novel. London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2007.

Non-Fiction Novels:


13. The Armies of the Night (1968)
    • The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel / The Novel as History. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
14. Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (1968)
    • Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
15. Of a Fire on the Moon (1971)
    • A Fire on the Moon. 1970. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1971.
16. St. George and The Godfather (1972)
17. The Fight (1975)
    • The Fight. 1975. Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. London: Penguin, 1991.
18. The Executioner's Song (1979)
    • The Executioner's Song. 1979. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1980.

Biographies:


19. Marilyn: A Biography (1973)
    • Marilyn: A Biography. Pictures by the World's Foremost Photographers. London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 1973.
20. Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man: An Interpretive Biography (1995)
21. Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (1995)
    • Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery. 1995. An Abacus Book. London: Little, Brown and Company (UK), 1996.

Essays:


22. The White Negro (1957)
23. Advertisements for Myself (1959)
    • Advertisements for Myself. 1959. Panther Books Ltd. London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1972.
24. The Presidential Papers (1963)
    • The Presidential Papers. 1963. Panther Books Ltd. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1976.
25. Cannibals and Christians (1966)
    • Cannibals and Christians. 1966. London: Sphere Books Limited, 1969.
26. The Bullfight: A Photographic Narrative with Text by Norman Mailer (1967)
27. The Idol and the Octopus: Political Writings on the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations (1968)
28. King of the Hill: Norman Mailer on the Fight of the Century (1971)
29. The Long Patrol: 25 Years of Writing from the Work of Norman Mailer (1971)
30. The Prisoner of Sex (1971)
    • The Prisoner of Sex. 1971. London: Sphere Books Limited, 1972.
31. Existential Errands (1972)
32. The Faith of Graffiti (1974)
33. Genius and Lust: A Journey through the Major Writings of Henry Miller (1976)
34. Some Honorable Men: Political Conventions, 1960-1972 (1976)
35. Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots (1980)
36. Pieces and Pontifications (1982)
37. Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988)
38. The Time of Our Time (1998)
    • The Time of Our Time. 1998. An Abacus Book. London: Little, Brown and Company (UK), 1999.
39. The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing (2003)
40. Why Are We At War? (2003)
41. The Big Empty (2006)
42. On God: An Uncommon Conversation. With J. Michael Lennon (2007)

Stories:


1. The Collision (1933)
2. It (1939) [SF]
3. The Greatest Thing in the World (1940) [SF]
4. Right Shoe on Left Foot (1941)
5. Maybe Next Year (1941[) [SF]
6. A Calculus at Heaven (1942) [SF]
7. Love Buds (1942–43)
8. Great in the Hay (1950) [SF]
9. The Blood of the Blunt (1951)
10. Dr. Bulganoff and the Solitary Teste (1951)
11. La Petite Bourgeoise (1951)
12. Pierrot [aka "The Patron Saint of MacDougal Alley"] (1951) [SF]
13. The Thalian Adventure (1951)
14. The Paper House (1951–1952) [SF]
15. The Dead Gook (1951–1952) [SF]
16. The Language of Men (1951–1952) [SF]
17. The Notebook (1951–1952) [SF]
18. The Man Who Studied Yoga (1951–1952) [SF]
19. Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out (1958) [SF]
20. The Time of Her Time (1958) [SF]
21. The Killer: a Story (1960) [SF]
22. Truth and Being: Nothing and Time (1960) [SF]
23. The Last Night: a Story (1962) [SF]
24. The Locust Cry (1963) [SF]
25. The Shortest Novel of Them All (1963) [SF]
26. Ministers of Taste: A Story (1965) [SF]

Short Story Collections:


43. The Short Fiction of Norman Mailer (1967) [SF]

Plays and screenplays:


44. The Deer Park: A Play (1967)
45. Maidstone: A Mystery (1971)

Poetry:


46. Deaths for the Ladies (And Other Disasters) (1962)
    • Deaths for the Ladies (and other disasters). New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1962.
47. Modest Gifts: Poems and Drawings (2003)

Letters:


48. Norman Mailer's Letters on An American Dream, 1963-1969 (2004)
49. The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer (2014)

Secondary:


50. Hilary Mills. Mailer: A Biography. 1982. London: New English Library, 1983.
51. Peter Manso. Mailer: His Life and Times (1985)
52. J. Michael Lennon. Norman Mailer: A Double Life (2013)
53. Richard Bradford. Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer (2023)

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Herman Wouk (1972)

Herman Wouk
(1915-2019)

Novels:


1. Aurora Dawn (1947)
2. City Boy: The Adventures of Herbie Bookbinder (1948)
3. The Caine Mutiny (1951)
4. Marjorie Morningstar (1955)
5. Slattery's Hurricane (1956)
6. The "Lomokome" Papers (1956)
7. Youngblood Hawke (1962)
8. Don't Stop the Carnival (1965)
9. The Winds of War (1971)
10. War and Remembrance (1978)
11. Inside, Outside (1985)
12. The Hope (1993)
13. The Glory (1994)
14. A Hole in Texas (2004)
15. The Lawgiver (2012)

Plays:


16. The Man in the Trench Coat (1941)
17. The Traitor (1949)
18. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1953)
19. Nature's Way (1957)

Non-fiction:


20. This is My God: The Jewish Way of Life (1959)
21. The Will to Live On: This is Our Heritage (2000)
22. The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion (2010)
23. Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year Old Author (2015)

Herman Wouk: The Caine Mutiny (1951)

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